Note To Self II
A reminder for me to get this book.
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NEW STRAITS TIMES: BOOKS
July 14, 2004
DEAD UNTIL DARK
by Charlaine Harris, Orbit
RM35.50, pp326
Saving the dead from the living
TWILIGHT descends on the Louisiana bayou. A few miles out of Shreveport in the state's northeast, citizens of the little town Bon Temps make their way slowly to Sam Merlotte's watering hole to wash away the remains of the day.
A vampire walks into the bar, his dark eyes resting temporarily on Sookie Stackhouse the waitress before he sits down at a table. Remember, Louisiana is the home of the Vampire Lestat. On seeing a suave vampire, normal human beings either swoon with delight or run away screaming.
"Take me, O immortal prince," a modern Morticia might say. "Long have I desired to journey forth into the great Dark. I am ready." Etc, etc.
Not so Sookie. She's blond, pretty good looking by her own account, and all she says is "hot diggity".
"He was pale, of course; hey he was dead, if you believed the old tales. The politically correct theory, the one the vamps themselves publicly backed, had it that this guy was the victim of a virus that left him apparently dead for a couple of days and thereafter allergic to sunlight, silver and garlic." Sookie's problem is that she's a mind-reader, and it's a big problem. She can't turn her gift on and off at will; in fact, most of the time, she exerts considerable energy just trying to keep everyone's thoughts out of her head. As a result, she's a little weird. She has no friends and no life to speak of. "Imagine," she asks, "knowing everything your sex partner is thinking. Right. Along the order of ‘Gosh, look at that mole ... her butt is a little big ... etc." The beautiful thing about The Vampire Bill (that's his name, not Lestat, Antoine, or Basil or something) is that Sookie can't hear a single thing in his head on account of his being a vampire. A definite plus.
Bill is "mainstreaming", i.e. trying to assimilate with regular humans, since the law now recognises vampires as legal personalities. He possesses in buckets that good old-fashioned Southern manners (having been born before the Civil War), and he's interested in Sookie. Another definite plus.
Even Grandma Adele thinks highly of him and wants him to give a talk at the local historical society (in the evening, of course. Bill would fry during the day). That about does it for the plus thing.
The problem with Bill is his past. He hangs out with some seriously dodgy vampires who have a homicidal record — they're vampires who don't give a cucumber sandwich for humanity except for the blood and a bit of mindless, voluntary slavery from "fang-bangers" (vampire groupies).
Things start to get hot when single women in Bon Temps turn up dead: strangled, with vampire bites on them. Fingers naturally start pointing at Bill and Sookie has to do something to help protect her new old friend.
In this, the first Sookie Stackhouse novel, author Charlaine Harris demonstrates a knack for fusing together elements of chick lit, gothic horror and detective fiction into a whimsical, often racy and occasionally horrifying thriller.
She disdains the detailed — and often embarrassingly self-important — pseudo-mythologies that some writers in this genre have felt themselves obliged to obey — pseudo-mythologies that, as a result of all this seriousness, read more like manifestos for a demented gothic subculture.
Of course there are stakes, garlic, and the usual lot of nonsense peculiar to vampire stories, but Vampire Bill is more likely to discuss kitchen designs than drink your blood (he's fine with synthetic, made in Japan).
And Vampire Bill is a fan of Kenny G's. Not a plus in this reviewer's book, but that should say something.
All the same, beneath Harris's levity lurks a more sinister reality. Discrimination is a principal theme, with decent law-abiding vampires considered social pariahs and hounded around town by policemen. Often, Harris's real monsters are human — child molesters, for example, as well as rapists and a new kind of criminal whose business is the illegal extraction of vampire blood (thought to be a kind of rejuvenating aphrodisiac).
All of this is made apparent by the crisis precipitated by the murders. Angry human residents of Bon Temps burn down a house with three vampires within; Sookie's cat is strangled because of her boyfriend. When someone kills old Grandma Adele, Sookie's blood boils over. But who are the suspects? Bill unfortunately comes out tops — but so do a few hundred other people. Anyone might be the murderer — human or vampire, and it's up to Sookie to set things to rights before Bill too is engulfed by the violence.
The Sookie Stackhouse mysteries are not the Vampire Chronicles of Anne Rice. They do, however, possess a vampiric charm of their own; so much so that one trusts Harris will keep on writing.
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